To keep the process description as simple as possible I will focus on the most important details of the project, skipping techniques already described in other tutorials found on 3DLuVr. I'll try to explain every step in a software-independent way.

Modeling

I used for the bug my favorite modeling technique: NURMS (Non-Uniform Rational Mesh Smooth); a relatively fast and simple process that allows working on a low poly mesh and watching the high poly result simultaneously. I chose this technique essentially because of its easiness on adding detail at any stage of the process and for its clean and smooth end result.

Starting from a sphere primitive, vertexes were adjusted to resemble the bug's body, with special attention to the shell's border. Its lower part was tessellated to create the waving profile of the body. All faces of the right tip of the sphere were deleted, allowing for the extrusion of the head.

After adjusting the overall appearance of the head (just a matter of extruding edges and tweaking vertexes), faces were extruded to create the antennas and the saliencies near the bug's mouth. The legs were also created from consecutive extrusions, starting from faces located on the side of the body. The Meshsmooth modifier produced the smooth and detailed final mesh.

The ground was created from a patch grid with a Noise modifier applied. (I applied a planar mapping modifier before the addition of the noise modifier to prevent unwanted bitmap projection when the textures were assigned later on)

The stones are spheres with a sufficiently high number of faces to allow a smooth deformation from a Noise modifier.
I gave a unique seed value for each stone (so they never look alike) and scaled them to different sizes.